“Oh.” Thoughts swirled in her head, none of them good. “Well, fuck.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Matt looked angry.
None of it made sense. “What would a Russian mobster be doing in my father’s office in Portland? And abducting me?”
“We need to find your father. Right now. He’s clearly a key to what’s going on.”
“Without those Russian fuckheads realizing Honor’s alive,” Matt added, turning to Luke. “But her dad’s in LA. Who do we have in LA right now?”
“No one.” Luke shook his head. “We’ve got operations going on in Canada and in Jordan. And cold weather training in Alaska. We’re really shorthanded.”
Honor noticed that Luke, too, spoke of ASI in terms of ‘us’. From what she understood, he was still officially with the Portland Police Department. Clearly his loyalties had already shifted.
“Uh, guys?” Felicity’s light voice floated into the room.
Matt and Luke almost came to point. “Felicity?” Matt asked. “You okay?”
“Fine. Fantastic, in fact. Ginger did the trick. Thanks, Honor.”
Honor smiled. She’d left word to Felicity through Metal to eat slices of raw ginger for the nausea. It was probably passing into the second trimester that did the trick, but ginger definitely helped. “Glad it worked.”
“Dante’s in Los Angeles. There’s some kind of DEA reunion going on. I took the liberty of contacting him. He’s already checking on Honor’s father.”
“Great.” The tension in Matt’s face lifted a little.
“And Jacko and Joe are in San Diego. They’re on their way to LA.”
Luke blew out a breath in relief. It was good to have his exhausted face up on that huge screen rather than those frightening men, larger than life.
Matt put his arm around her. “Looks like your father’s in trouble. I’ll have a couple of guys come up and keep you safe and I’ll go down to LA.”
“I’ll go, too,” Luke said from the screen and Matt nodded.
“If this mess has anything to do with my father and he’s in LA, I’m coming too,” Honor said.
Matt stiffened, his entire body giving off oh no you’re not vibes. “Oh no you’re not,” he said.
“No.” That came from Luke who looked just as disapproving and forbidding.
Honor had long and hard experience in doing what strong-willed men didn’t want her to do. Her whole life had been that, in fact. She wasn’t intimidated and she wasn’t scared and she wasn’t backing down.
She looked at Matt then at Luke, knowing what they saw on her face. Utter determination. “Oh, yes,” she said quietly. “I am.”
Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles
Antonov stood on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard. Brass stars inset into the cracked sidewalk stretched away as far as the eye could see, on both sides of the street. Names on all of the stars. Famous names and names that Antonov had never heard of before.
No matter.
They all bore testimony to the American talent of entertaining the world. Many of the names on those stars were known in Ulan Bator and Vladivostok and Novgorod. Youngsters knew them where they’d never heard of Peter the Great or Pushkin.
This stretch of road was one of the most famous roads in the world. In one of the most famous cities in the world.
Hollywood. Part of Los Angeles. In the remotest corners of the world, on black and white TVs with rabbit ears, on screens made of sheets strung up in alleys, those iconic views of a low-slung car with the top down driving along streets flanked by tall palm trees, the skies an almost insane blue overhead, were the stuff dreams were made of.
Russia had famous artists, too, but no one knew their names. The most famous dancers were men who had defected—Nureyev and Baryshnikov. Russia had the finest dancers, the best musicians and composers, the most exquisite artists and yet their fame never made it outside the confines of the country unless they were exiled like Solzhenitsyn.
Russia had no place in the world’s imagination.
That was going to change.
Antonov started walking slowly down the Boulevard, drinking in the sights and sounds. He was dressed in faded jeans and a plaid shirt. He wore Frye boots, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, wraparound sunglasses and a wig of long black hair.
He was fairly sure that he would never be recognized in the footage of the security cameras he could see everywhere. And after, of course, the cameras would be lost.
It was a small risk he was taking but it was worth it. Because, just as some could see the skull beneath the face, Antonov could see the After beneath the shiny surface of Hollywood Boulevard.
Right now, Hollywood Boulevard was teeming with people. Tourists. Los Angelenos would never be caught here, in the tourist traps. If he listened, he could hear Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, every regional variation of English and even Russian, at times.
When he heard his native language spoken, he’d look sharply at those compatriots from behind his dark sunglasses.
Traitors.
Sunburned, bags full of cheap trinkets, grinning like fools. Antonov wanted to scream at them to go home. Idi domoy! Back where men and women led serious sober lives, not this foolish dermo.
All the shops were full of childish crap, toys essentially, for adults. Even the food was for children. Overly sweet and soft, as if even the act of chewing were too adult.
Ivanov crossed the street. There was one star he had to see and he found it easily, in front of another souvenir store.
There it was. He stood over it, a name with the symbol of a movie camera. Meaning he was a movie actor. A second-rate one. But a man who’d become President of the United States.
Ronald Reagan. Ivanov stood over it, heart pulsing with hatred. He’d been a very young soldier in Afghanistan and hadn’t heard the news. But when Reagan stood in Berlin and said “Mr. Gorbachov, tear down this wall!” that traitor Gorbachov listened. Two years later, the Wall was down. The Soviet Army was retreating in defeat from Afghanistan. And on Christmas Day, two years after that, the Soviet Union collapsed.
Enough of the past. Ivanov stopped for a moment, moving to the side of the walkway with the brassy stars so he wouldn’t impede the flow of people, and opened up his mind to what the future would bring.
In a moment, he could see it, feel it, smell it.
Utter devastation, that’s what he could see. The buildings abandoned, left to the animals that would creep back from where they’d been banished up in the hills. The coyotes and wolves and rats wouldn’t know about radioactivity. For the first months, they’d feast on all the food left lying around, until it rotted.
But soon plants would overgrow everything.
Antonov had been to Chernobyl, expecting devastation and desolation. What he found was thriving plants, mainly soy and flax. Green and dense, a lush carpet overlaying everything. Scientists even came to study how the plants had adapted. The latest theory was that they’d had to adapt to higher levels of natural radioactivity hundreds of thousands of years earlier, and what was dormant in their cells had reawakened.
The landscape would be pristine, the radioactivity having killed off molds and pests. Just glossy plants, doing just fine.
The same could not be said of man. This entire basin would be abandoned.
Americans were risk averse. No one would live even within hundreds of miles of Los Angeles. They would scramble to get out and never come back. It would be gone — all of it. The entire conglomeration would be empty, the freeways glittering ribbons of metal since cars would have been abandoned on the roads when they ran out of gas. It was entirely likely that there would be sun-bleached bones — too many bodies to recover.
This was a city that had an outsized hold on the imagination of Americans, of the entire world. Who hadn’t watched a film set here? Los Angeles was the second largest city in the United States but it was also the beating heart of California, the richest state. A state richer than m
any countries. Would Americans abandon California, too?
Maybe.
It would be delicious if they did, but Antonov couldn’t count on it. He could count, however, on years of chaos and panic. Count on at least a twenty-percent drop in GDP. New alliances. Maybe the United States would disintegrate, the suffering western states hiving off to form their own country, shunned by the rest.
Massive economic damage, political upheaval when social media started leaking — slowly at first then faster and faster — that this was homegrown terrorism.
It would give a resurgent Rodina time to stretch its wings, gather its fallen children, become an empire once again. Buildings full of internet trolls working around the clock would sow discord, ripping society apart. Fingers pointing, poison seeping into politics, hatred spreading — all while California burned.
America’s largest port — gone.
Much of its aerospace industry — gone.
Silicon Valley — they wouldn’t want to stay only a couple hundred miles from radioactive terrain — gone.
The second largest airport in the country — gone
The nation’s provider of fresh fruit and vegetables — gone.
Its wine industry — gone.
The Hollywood sign in the hills with missing letters, like a broken-toothed mouth.
Above all, the dream factory — wrecked. It was America’s stranglehold on the world’s imagination that was even more powerful than its missiles and aircraft carriers. African children in the veldt, old women in Nepal, roadside vendors in the mountains of Peru — they all knew Ironman and The Godfather and X-Men. Hollywood told the world’s stories and was the purveyor of its dreams.
That would be gone, too.
One thousand square miles of devastation.
Los Angeles, the city of dreams would become Los Angeles, the cemetery of dreams.
The Grange
“Look.”
Matt’s voice was reasonable but there was a drop of sweat falling down the side of his face. Which was amazing if you thought about it. As a former SEAL, he’d gone into battle countless times. Been shot at. Been shot, actually. She remembered those puckered scars on his back, corresponding to the puckered scars on his chest.
He was sweaty and anxious because of her.
“We don’t know where your father is.” He tried to make his voice reasonable but he sounded hoarse, like he’d been screaming. He hadn’t. He was speaking softly. “We don’t know for sure if he’s even in LA .”
“True.” Honor put down the tea she was drinking. There were thermoses of tea and coffee on a sideboard and she’d gotten up to pour tea and coffee for them before Matt’s head exploded.
Matt was a bundle of tension Honor could feel, sitting so close to him. It was like he agitated the molecules in the air. He was ignoring his big earthenware mug of coffee. “I’m assuming Dante will be able to find out if Dad is in Los Angeles, one way or another?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Matt cleared his throat. “He’s pretty good at investigating and he’s got an unofficial network of retired DEA agents that are good at undercover work. We’ll know something by morning.” He looked down at the steaming mug in front of him, turning it around and around with his big hands.
“He’s there,” Honor said softly. “And he’s in trouble.”
He looked up sharply. “And you know this how?”
She hesitated. “I just know it,” she said. It was too insubstantial a thing to talk about but she and her father had always shared a bond. It was why she was so adamant he take better care of himself because she could feel that he was in bad shape, risking serious health issues. Here, too. It was like she put out feelers that were telling her that something was wrong.
In any other instance, she’d be on the phone with him, maybe even booking a flight down to LA. Imagining him collapsed on the floor or in bed, unable to get up. She’d have sent one of the employees of Quest Line to see how he was.
But of course she couldn’t get in contact with anyone. Whatever her abductors wanted from her they’d surely be watching her dad. True, they thought she was dead, but her safety depended on that.
And — the thought was painful, like shards of broken glass inside her head — it was entirely possible that all of this — whatever this was — involved her father. He had a shipping company and all sorts of —
Honor gasped. “Oh my God!”
Matt’s head swiveled and so did Luke’s, on the big screen. “What?” Matt said.
Honor’s hand covered her mouth as she worked through it. Her mind wasn’t as sharp as it usually was, otherwise she’d have made the connections sooner. But the big elements here were pretty clear.
“We have this Lee Chamness and my dad and you. Somehow connected, though I don’t see the connections clearly. But Chamness is definitely connected with my father. And you said that he was protecting this warlord in Afghanistan.”
Matt nodded. “‘Our guy’, he called him.”
“And ‘our guy’ was sitting right in the middle of a field of poppies.”
Matt’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
“My father’s shipping line has a B-43 exemption.”
Both Matt and Luke frowned.
“It’s a little-known exemption for transporters, particularly for shipping lines. A sort of a relic from before the days of terrorists, but some shipping lines still have the certificate.”
“Which is?” Luke asked.
“Except for security measures like retinal scans that are carried out by the government in the shipping line head office and other minor security measures, some shipments can enter the United States on an expedited basis.”
“Meaning?” Matt asked.
“Without inspection.”
Dead silence.
“The ships just … land?” Luke asked.
Honor nodded. “Selected shipments that are time sensitive, say. They land and are offloaded without any kind of inspection. My grandfather obtained a B-43 exemption and the company still has it. I don’t think my father uses it often, but if he does, no one will question the shipment.”
More dead silence.
Luke seemed to turn his eyes to Matt. “How much could we be talking about?”
Matt’s eyes looked up, to the left. Calculating. “The total production of heroin and opium in Afghanistan is about ten thousand metric tons a year. It could be any fraction of that. Half would be five thousand metric tons. One tenth of that, which Al Rashid definitely produces, would be half a million kilograms. The biggest problem is always shipment. If they found a way to ship most of a yearly production in one go, safely … God.”
“How much per kilogram?” Honor asked. Her lips felt numb, her hands felt icy while shivers of horror went up her spine. It was like looking at pure evil. She saw, daily, what heroin addiction did.
“About forty thousand dollars,” Matt said grimly. “On the streets. And that’s uncut. More if they cut it. How much cargo can one of your father’s ships carry?”
“His ships are on the small side, he’s a specialty carrier. About two hundred thousand tons. Which is —” she tried to do the calculations in her head and gave up. “More than enough. Half a million kilograms would fill just one section of the cargo bay. If a shipment of half a million kilograms is coming, that would be —” She blew out a breath, feeling the air in her lungs heavy as stones. Did the math. “That’s roughly twenty billion dollars. In one go. Not only that.”
She turned to Matt, placed her hand on his forearm. The muscles there were rock hard with tension. She knew exactly how he felt. It was all theory but it had the feel of truth, like when she had to make a diagnosis on insufficient data but the input she got from the sight and sounds and even smell of a patient told her she was on the right track.
She had a sixth sense for bad things.
“It gets worse?” Matt asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. Some of my dad’s ships are Ro-Ro. That means the ship’s cargo roll
s on and rolls off, either in trucks or sometimes in railroad cars. Those kilos of heroin could be in trucks already packed in the ship’s hold. They could drive right off the docks, and right into …”
Her throat seized up.
“Right into the country. It would be the worst wave of heroin hitting the streets ever. A normal tractor-trailer truck can carry about 45,000 pounds of cargo. Twenty trucks would do it.” Luke’s voice was low and grim. “It would be a disaster.”
“And a public health nightmare.” Honor shuddered. “We already get several drug overdoses a week. We’d have thousands coming in. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Matt looked at her and then toward the screen. “I’m not in law enforcement and I’m not an emergency room physician but I can see what destruction it would cause. With so much heroin they could afford to hook people cheaply. Hell, give away doses for free for months. Then step on it. Make literally billions. The people involved wouldn’t have to enter a life of crime. Just sell it to pushers in a one-time deal. This is like one spectacular heist and you retire because you won’t need money, ever again.”
“Whoever’s involved, it’s not my father.” Honor set her jaw. “Apart from the fact that he is an honorable man, he is totally anti-drugs. It’s true he is a child of the sixties and probably smoked a lot of weed when he was young, but I tell him stories from the emergency room. He’d never ever be a party to this.”
“If this is what it is,” Luke said slowly, “I believe you when you say your father is not involved. But he happens to control the perfect smuggling route.”
“But he’d have to be controlled.” Matt cocked his head while looking at her. “Forced to do their bidding. To okay the shipment, to sign the documents, to have his iris scanned, whatever the security arrangements are. And the best way to control him is to control you.”
An electric charge went through her as it all came together. The ease with which they subdued her, because they were men accustomed to violence. But — she’d seen violence used against women. She’d treated women with shattered jaws, who’d suffered punches to the belly so hard they’d lost their spleen, whose arms had been broken. She knew what uncontrolled violence looked like and they hadn’t used anything like that on her. They’d subdued her and abducted her not to hurt her, though they easily could have. It had all been to use her against her father.
Midnight Renegade (Men of Midnight Book 7) Page 18